A more human-centered, grounded path to legal AI
For Willkie, adopting AI had to move beyond being powerful — it had to be practical, authoritative, and worthy of attorney trust.
A more human-centered, grounded path to legal AI
For Willkie, adopting AI had to move beyond being powerful — it had to be practical, authoritative, and worthy of attorney trust.
As generative AI gained momentum across the legal industry, Willkie noticed the same thing many other firms were experiencing: growing curiosity, mounting expectations, and real demand from attorneys who wanted to understand how these tools could fit into their daily work. But for Todd Friedlich, the question was never simply how quickly the firm could adopt AI. It was how to do so in a way that preserved rigor, supported legal teams, and reflected the high standards clients expect from a leading law firm.
“We have been deliberate about AI at Willkie,” Todd shared. “The value was obvious early on, but the first wave of tools was still working through its version-one problems. Rather than put unproven products in front of our attorneys, we used that window to build our own foundation and get clear on where the real value was and where the risk sat. When we started to integrate outside tools, the technology had matured and we knew exactly how we wanted to use it.”
A technologist at heart
Long before his role as Director of AI & Innovation at Willkie, and before holding other positions in technology and knowledge management at law firms over the past few decades, Todd was building computers and teaching himself programming languages.
“So, when I first joined a large law firm in early 2000, I saw that there were tremendous inefficiencies in the way they were capturing information from past matters,” Todd said. “Through the years, I started to build precedent libraries and seek new ways to simplify the process of accessing data and getting insights into the hands of our attorneys. More recently, we’re focused on the processes and daily tasks that can be automated or optimized using new technologies.”
Wendell Intelligence is a case in point. The firm built its own orchestration layer in-house, backed by firm leadership and a dedicated AI and innovation team. Building it themselves let Willkie lay the groundwork for legal AI before bringing in outside vendors, and gave the firm time to work out what mattered most in choosing a legal tech partner.
“We never want to just buy a bunch of products and throw them at our attorneys,” he shared. “We're going to invest a significant amount of time, energy, and money in driving adoption and getting people excited about these tools and integrating them into our stack. We want to make sure that we are finding the best possible partners.”
Authoritative resources, closer at hand
Today, Willkie’s AI strategy focuses on more than just providing access to new technology. In fast-paced legal practice, outputs must be consistent, grounded, verifiable, and tied to authoritative sources. The firm’s approach emphasizes that attorneys cannot rely on answers pulled from unknown or unverified material; they need responses connected to current law and backed by trusted, reviewable citations.
“Grounding the data within our generative AI tools is of the utmost importance to Willkie,” Todd shared. “It’s how we ensure our answers are based on current law and authoritative documents. Our attorneys know every answer they receive must include a citation — not just that a citation exists, but that they can click through, review the underlying document, review the source, and vet the accuracy of the information themselves.”
Just as important, Todd shared, Willkie’s legal teams must know how to use AI effectively and responsibly, always with human oversight.
“I can suggest ideas, see where the AI takes me, and then verify it. I’m still the human in the loop with my lifetime of experience, but I can use AI as a sounding board to find new opportunities and new pathways."
The real return on investment with legal AI moves beyond using AI as an assistant to AI as a partner, AI as a colleague. Someone who simultaneously knows way more than you and way less than you, someone who you can bounce ideas off of.
Finding AI lawyers could trust
Given the firm’s longtime partnership with LexisNexis®, Willkie’s attorneys were already familiar with the secure Lexis platform. Integrating Lexis+® with Protégé™ offered a natural next step: an advanced AI assistant connected to trusted legal solutions. For Todd, it was important that Protégé be integrated into everyday legal work to be able to generate fast, reliable insights for attorneys in step with their proprietary orchestration layer.
Even more valuable was that the product could help bring legal teams closer to grounded legal content at the very moment they needed it, making it easier to move from prompt to verified content without sacrificing confidence in the underlying information.
“By ensuring our attorneys have access to tools like Lexis+ with Protege, we can simplify the process of exposing grounded information to them,” Todd shared. “We're no longer requiring them to go to separate data systems and gather that information and then enter them into some other AI to provide an answer.”
By connecting AI capabilities to authoritative legal sources, Willkie can support attorneys in reviewing and validating the information behind each response. This doesn’t replace legal judgment but rather strengthens the foundation on which that judgment is applied.
Intentional adoption
Todd makes clear that technology alone does not create value. Adoption does.
“Innovation without adoption is really just theory,” Todd said. “We can buy and build the most incredible tools imaginable, but if the attorneys and staff aren't using them, it's just a waste of time and money.”
That belief shapes Willkie’s broader approach to AI. The firm pairs new tools with direct attorney education through workshops, one-on-one sessions, and hands-on demonstrations designed to show not only what the adopted technology can do, but how to use it to generate the greatest value for attorneys and their clients. That includes helping attorneys learn effective prompting and verification, as well as the importance of reviewing citations and source documents before relying on a result.
Elevating the quality of work and life
The introduction of Lexis+ with Protégé workflows is an important part of continuing to make legal AI genuinely useful for Willkie’s legal teams. Todd shares that in recurring legal tasks such as due diligence, structured workflows can help reduce prompt variability and give attorneys a more consistent path to useful, verified outputs.
The value is not just speed. It’s a more practical, repeatable way to use AI — one that leaves more room for the human elements of legal judgment, strategic thinking, and building client relationships.
“We’re creating automated workflows that improve the quality of life for our associates and partners,” said Todd. “It’s not just about saying, ‘Here’s a tool to automate a document.’ It’s about identifying and automating the simple tasks that don’t deliver significant value to clients and bring little joy to our attorneys. We’re eager to build processes that make our lives and our work better.”
The payoff: stronger structure, greater confidence
Willkie’s adoption of Protégé reflects the firm’s broader technology philosophy: legal AI should not just be powerful, it should be grounded, usable, and worthy of attorney trust. Todd is excited to continue to lead and shape Willkie’s thoughtful approach to tech innovation — one built on reliable resources, careful implementation, and purposeful design to support how lawyers actually work.
For Willkie, this is where legal AI begins to deliver real value and what true human-centric technology is all about.
